Great Tracks No13. Adore by Savages

Cant help but think that this track taken from their Adore Life album of 2016 is more operatic than a good majority of operatic arias. Just play it full blast!
You just could not concede that a post punk all female group could produce a song of this magnitude. Saw them at the El Ray Theatre in LA for the first time to be followed up at a magnificent performance at the 2016 EOTR with Jehnny Beth literally walking onto top of the audience rather than crowd surf. A great group.

Great Tracks No 10: September Fields by Frazey Ford from Indian Ocean

Just love this album. The stand out track is September Fields, which incidentally was when I missed seeing her perform at EOTR due to being elsewhere at the festival.
A unique voice with tremendous support from Al Green's backing band Hi Rhythm Section, a lush production recorded in Memphis. This is not a soul record but a laid back anthem to those lazy days by the gentle lapping of the Ocean itself.
Two every notable tracks are Natural Law and the title track Indian Ocean.

Great Tracks No9. Svo Hljott by Sigur Ros

From its very quiet start, into a plodding almost step like rhythm as Jonsi comes in with his distinctive Icelandic vocalisation this songs builds up reflecting in my view an adventure through Iceland's landscape. Through hearing you can see waterfalls, glaciers, snow falling and finally building to erupting volcanoes as it reaches its crescendo.
Stupendous

Great Tracks No8, The Jungle Line by Herbie Hancock,vocals by Leonard Cohen

What a great cover version of the Joni Mitchell song from her Hissing of Summer Lawns LP.
Just elevates the song into a different sphere echoing her claim to be a poet first and foremost.
Well done to both Herbie Hancock for his interpretation and Leonard Cohens dead pan delivery.

Great Tracks No7, Bahamut, by Hazmat Modine

This is something completely different, Hazmat Modine are a blues/folk/world fusion/jazz musical group from New York. "Hazmat" is a portmanteau of "hazardous material" and "Modine" is the name of a company that manufactures commercial heaters and is appropriate since thy "blow a lot of hot air," from instruments including harmonicas, tubas and saxophones.
Bahamut is half sung, half spoken and about a vast mythological fish that supports the earth, where in some sources is described as having a head resembling a hippopotamus or elephant. The song is pushed along by a tuba carrying out the duties of a bass, has a mid section of the spoken word followed by a riotous finish.
Jeff Tamarkin of  AllMusic praised the band for successfully fusing styles as disparate as blues, jazz, klezmer, calypso, and ska into "music that sounds at once ageless and primeval, authentically indigenous and inexplicably otherworldly, familiar and unlike anything else.
Whatever, it is indeed excellent and surprisingly unknown in the UK, am I their only fan?
Well no, two days later I find that they are playing the Bath Fringe Festival in six weeks time! Tickets duly bought and quite excited to be seeing them.

Well, Bohemoth calls us his own
While Bahamut wanders alone
They both go out to play
On that cold and rainy day

And Bohemoth sings us his song
While Bahamut wanders along
But in the glory of this spring
You can hear Bahamut sing

Whoa-ho-ho
Are you as big as me?
Whoa-ho-ho-ho
Way too big to see
Whoa-ho-ho-ho-ho
Bahamut he goes so slow
Whoa-ho-ho-ho
Too big a place to go

(Solos)

(Spoken)
The entire known universe
Floats suspended in a thin silver bowl
Which rocks gently on the back
Of an immense blue-green tortuga
And the tortuga's scaly feet
Are firmly placed on the topmost
Of seven craggy mountains
Which arise from a vast and arid plain
Of drifting, fetid, yellow dust
And the plain is balanced precariously
On top of a small thin green acacia tree?
Which grows from the snout
Of a giant blood red ox
With 50 eyes that breathes flame
The color of the midnight sky
And the ox's hooves are firmly placed
On the single grain of sand
Which floats in the eye of Bahamut
Like a mote of dust
No one has ever seen Bahamut
Some think it's a fish
Some think it's a newt
All we know is that the lonely Bahamut
Floats endlessly through all time and all space
With all of us and everything
Floating in a single tear
Of his eye

Well, Bohemoth calls us his own
While Bahamut wanders alone
When they both go out to play
On that cold and rainy day

And Bohemoth sings us his song
While Bahamut wanders alone
But in the glory of their fall
You can hear Bahamut call

Whoa-ho-ho
Are you as big as me?
Whoa-ho-ho-ho
Way too big to see
Whoa-ho-ho-ho-ho
Bahamut he goes so slow
Whoa-ho-ho-ho
Too big a place to go

Great Tracks No6, Sometimes It Comes So Easy by Blackie and the Rodeo Kings

Recorded in 2009, this Canadian alternative country group are virtually unknown in the UK and it is only due to hearing this track played by Bob Harris on his Beeb country show, they would have passed me by.
It starts with a false start, then just gets into a groove, and what a groove it is. Simple repetitious drumming on the snare drum with lead guitar and keyboard fill over the top, it just shows how by keeping it simple the end result is quite something else.
The rest of the album is good too somewhat reminding of one of those bands you come across playing in a bar/pub and armed with a drink in hand you have a bloody good time.

Great Tracks No 5, Facelift by Soft Machine

Recorded in 1970, this the opening track on their album titled 'Third' is made up from two live recordings, primarily from Fairfield Hall, Croydon but some from the Mothers Club in Birmingham a week later
"Facelift" is the most radical track of the four on the double LP being some 19 minutes long. A majority of the finished product is essentially a live recording, involving tape collage, speeding up, slowing down, looping and backwards playing of tapes, the ending being the most memorable part, where two different treatments of the same basic riff (one from the live concert, the other, at double speed, from their Spaced project) are heard simultaneously, backwards. Facelift is bassist Hugh Hopper's composition and is an extended rock-jazz improvisation of the basic rift. Use of tapes in an live situation was ahead of its time, now a band would have a couple of laptops and an array of Boss loop pedals. Hopper did in fact employ a fuzz pedal. Saw them twice, once at the UCL student union in a large room with a very low ceiling, then when they made history by becoming the first 'rock band' invited to play at London's Proms in August 1970, a show which was broadcast live and subsequently released as a cd.
Very influential, and could have easily chosen any of the three other tracks, so a brief note for 'Slightly All The Time' and Robert Wyatt's 'Moon in June'
.

Great Tracks No 4, Sweetest Decline by Beth Orton

One of current favourite tracks at the moment, a very simple gentle ballad in fact that just oozes laid back calmness. The string background just lulls you into a great sense of well being and then over the top a simple repeating melody on piano (Dr John The Night Tripper???) and Beth's glorious vocals over the top.
Wonderful chill out music, you could loop it forever.

Great tracks No3: Astral Weeks by Van Morrison

Released in 1968, such a great opener on such a great album. Beautifully scored with the minimum of instrumentation, acoustic (rytham) guitar, upright bass, flute, maracas, and a slewing string section. Lyrically said to be going head to head with Dylan at the time but criticallt reviewed as 'impressionistic' and even 'stream of conciousness' this 43 years later sounds as contemporary as the come. Within a five to six years and after the release of St Dominic's Preview it was all downhill for Van the Man.
A must for anybodies album collection.

Great Tracks No2, Tip Your Way by The Felice Brothers

On the evening when I have just learnt The Felice Brothers gig tomorrow night has just been postponed until March and I was going. Ian Felice hospitalised with shingles in Berlin, I offer this concluding track of their second and eponymously called The Felice Brothers.

It’s a list and but a simple and mesmerising one, the rhythm like the Unthanks before is driven along by someone tapping their feet. The song slowly builds, thirteen verses in all, an example....

Tip the corner bum everyday
Tip the New York whore in the sleigh
Tip the carousel girl, tip the monkey in curls
Tip your way into heaven's gate.

And then picking up pace to a rousing finish...

Tip your own true love in the rain
Leave her there where the saxophone's play
Boy you're young as can be, you got country to see
Your a long ways from heaven's gate.

Probably not the most well known, and the three times I have had the pleasure of seeing them live, not performed live, but like most of the songs on the cd, a tune you can hum/whistle/sing along too.

This should be a must have album, don’t pass it by because you have never heard them. 

Again wonderful

Great Tracks No1: Felton Lonnin by Rachael Unthank and The Winterset

Felton Lonnin is the opening track of Bairns and a remarkable starter it is too, both contemporary and timeless, it is a traditional Northumberland song arranged by Johnny Handle but given the sister's unmistakable slant. the centre section containing an atmospheric interlude entirely of strings and as described on the attributes, feet. The foot tapping provides the rhythm whilst the string section has a minimalistic but Chinese sweep to it, I have not heard the likes of it before.
Opening verse goes.................

 The kye's come hyem, but Aa see not me hinny;
 the kye's come hyem, but Aa see not me bairn;
 Aa'd rather loss aall the kye than loss me bairn.
 Fair faced is me hinny, his blue eyes are bonny,
 his hair in curled ringlets hung sweet to the sight;
 O mount the old pony, seek after me hinny,
 and bring to his mammy her only delight.

Wonderful